PS Inspiration Take II: Getting Back on the Infinite Staircase

'The learned man is the only person who is not a stranger in foreign countries, nor friendless when he has lost his relations; but that in every state he is a citizen, and that he can look upon a change of fortune without fear. But he who thinks himself secured by the aid of wealth, and not of learning, treads on slippery ground, and leads an unstable and insecure life.'
-Theophrastus

Reminds me of the Godsmen Factol who relies more on networks of friendships than wealth or storehouses of weapons.

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“That all opposites—such as mass and energy, subject and object, life and death—are so much each other that they are perfectly inseparable, still strikes most of us as hard to believe. But this is only because we accept as real the boundary line between the opposites. It is, recall, the boundaries themselves which create the seeming existence of separate opposites. To put it plainly, to say that "ultimate reality is a unity of opposites" is actually to say that in ultimate reality there are no boundaries. Anywhere.”
― Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth

"No one deserves to be subjected to the appalling instruments of cruelty. Nevertheless, even at the cost of misanthropy, one cannot afford to pretend that victimhood improves anyone in any way. If we do not remember that anyone can be a victim, and if we allow hatred for torture, or pity for pain, to blind us, we will unwittingly aid the torturers of tomorrow by overrating the victims of today. One may be too easily tempted to think of all victims as equally innocent because there cannot, by definition, be a voluntary victim. That may have the consequence of promoting an endless exchange of cruelties between alternating tormentors and victims."

-Judith N. Shklar

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'The things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing, for example men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or another from our very youth. It makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.'
-Aristotle

Wolf relates physics to varied spiritual beliefs such as Peruvian shamanism, druid spirituality, and the Kabbalah. As always, not endorsing or refuting anyone's beliefs!

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"Our normal waking consciousness… is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness... How to regard them is the question… At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality."
-William James

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"Reflection will show that the physical body… is but the focus in which the forms or data of our sense-experience are, as it were, collected. The idea of the body as standing in its own right, as a collection of flesh, bones, nerves and so forth, is an artificial mental construction obtained by abstraction from conscious experience."
-Krishna Prem

"...Malkuth is the Sphere in which the entire creative process of the Tree comes to fruition and manifestation; it contains and fulfills all of the other Spheres. Its symbolic colors include citrine, russet, and olive, the colors of full-grown vegetation, along with Binah's somber black, a reminder that when summer is at its height winter is not so far away. In the Golden Dawn tradition, the annual Consecration of the Vault of the Adepts is held near the Summer Solstice; the vault is the symbolic burying place of Christian Rosencreutz, the legendary founder of the Rosicrucian Order, and the imagery of the vault deep within the earth, fashioned as a symbol of the universe, resonates well with Malkuth...."

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'In 2-Space I'm invulnerable to all feeling; here, every single moment of existence is agony and blinding, obscene arousal. I don't want "first contact" with my past life. I want things to stay this way forever.'
-Grant Morrison, The Filth

'Hear this: When our masters' work is done, every living thing will have the status of a machine. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. We will replace contact with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. We will cover the earth with steel and with concrete, this planet will be a factory farm producing morons to fuel and mantain the factory engines and feed our masters. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve and die in anguish and ignorance. Look around you, the process is already in its final stages. And you, like everyone else, will take your place on the production line.'
-Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

This made me think of Factol Skall's belief that no-one gets True Death unless everyone in the Multiverse does:

"I was once asked what it means to enter the void. I will tell you. An airbender may meditate for a hundred years trying to detach herself from the world, but she cannot do it. Humans cherish human life, and by that they are bound to this world. The only way to abandon the world is to abandon one’s humanity. New growth cannot exist without first the destruction of the old. The void is found in the sowing of death. From that death springs life on the wind."

Art is magic... But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic.
-Hans Hoffman

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The present painter can be said to work with chaos not only in the sense that he is handling the chaos of the blank picture plane but also in that he is handling the chaos of form. In trying to go beyond the visible and the known world he is working with forms that are unknown even to him. He is therefore engaged in a true act of discovery in the creation of new forms and symbols that will have the living quality of creation.
-Barnett Newman

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When something unreal can become almost real, it is perhaps more frightening to us, and perhaps more revealing.
-David Levinthal

"The nature of my work has involved many journeys into the spirit world. According to tradition I have always left my physical body guarded by a close friend in the Order. This ancient tradition - spiritual journeyer paired with physical observer - is as old as the age of the Avatar. It is ostensibly to ensure my bodys physical safety. The true purpose of the practice is to guard against a much more sinister threat. While my spirit is on its journey, an ambitious spirit may seek habitation within my body.

A rogue spirit moves through unwilling flesh like venom. Ancient records show that victims of possession exhibit signs of delirium when they awaken, as the foreign spirit attempts to assert control over the body. My guardian in the physical world watches for these signs. In the event of my possession, I must be prevented from deceiving my fellows within the Order, or all we are working for might be lost. My physical body must be destroyed. It is critical, therefore, that my guardians be chosen such that they know me personally, yet would have no compunctions against ending me for the greater good. Only the most fanatical members of the Order are entrusted with such a task. A young acolyte from the north with an interest in airbender philosophy is proving to be a promising candidate."

Legend of Korra, The Journals of Xai Bau

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'The truth is that the hands touch and the eyes see but the surface of things. They do not touch nor see the completeness, the inner reality of things. In our ignorance we look upon forms as reality, we must needs have something to touch and handle if we are to believe in its real existence. The forms are alright where they are but they do not exhaust existence. That which tells us they are there, the consciousness which causes our senses to function and our ego to become aware of the results of this functioning, is itself closer to real being than the physical forms or mental images which are but tokens of its presence. We look always for mere forms and so miss their infinite source. We try to reduce life to arithmetic, to make one thing the effect of some other thing as cause, never dreaming that the sublime essence of both is unchanging and uncaused, formless and bodiless, the self-existent reality of Mind!'

'The person is like an oyster shell, a mere house built around and existing for the living inhabitant within, yet a house that has somehow grown out of it and become inseparably a part of it.'

-Paul Brunton

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"Actually I would far rather be a professor at Basle university than God; but I didn't dare push my private selfishness, so as far as to neglect, just for myself, the creation of the world."
-Nietzsche

"Although the Theory of Forms seems a little bizarre or metaphysically florid to us today, Plato was really, in positing the Forms, no more than making explicit the ontological implication of the Greek discovery of truth. This reification of thought, this extraction, from fallible and temporal experience, of abstract and eternal mirror images of the world which then became the proper objects of the epistemological quest, resonates down through the Western tradition. It is the origin of theory: in projecting a mental reflection or representation or idealized picture of the world onto a kind of abstract screen in an inner theatre, the mind is constituting theory. These mental processes have left their trace in etymology: the word, ‘theory,’ is derived from the Greek, theoria, a looking at, thing looked at; theoros, spectator; and thea, spectacle."
-Freya Matthews

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“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
-Ian Maclaren

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"Great Bear - forgive me! I have slain you - taken your life!"
"No. You have freed me...I go now to a place beyond illusion, beyond form. You already stand in the midst of this great beauty. Only your eyes deceive you."
-Attanasio, The Wolf & The Crown

"It was the night before,
When all through the world,
No words, no dreams
Then one day,
A writer by a fire
Imagined all of Gaia
Took a journey into a child-man's heart...

A painter on the shore
Imagined all the world
Within a snowflake on his palm
Unframed by poetry
A canvas of awe
Planet Earth falling back into the stars..."

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"I can no more conceive of subjectivity as free-floating, un-referenced to a subject, or of a given subject’s subjectivity as somehow scattered or existing in discrete fragments, than I can conceive of thoughts and feelings having hard edges or clearly defined boundaries. The whole phenomenology of subjectivity is of a unified though unbounded field-phenomenon with shifting patterns of activation permeated with patterns of meaning that take their shape and coloration from the field as a whole. No segregation of thought or feeling can occur in this field, and every instance of experience is shaped by the larger meanings that inform the field and whose continual unfolding may drive change in the field as a whole. Cohering then is integral to subjectivity. If reality is experienced as cohering in similar fashion, this is good prima facie evidence, from the viewpoint of the strategist, unencumbered as he is with dualist presuppositions, that he and reality share a common nature. Reality coheres because it is, like him, inwardly constituted as a subject, as a field of subjectivity."
-Freya Matthews

Wow! Justin Gerad (girl riding the flying Dreamtime turtle?), Daniel Merriam (a cathedral on Yggdrasil's branches?), the paper craft Morrocon cloud city (a young elven Tree of Life on th Plane of Air?), the statues of Cameron Stalheim (the merged head and hand of Archmage Tzunk?)...

These are just incredibly inspirational! Thanks for continuing with these posts @sciborg2!

Glad you liked them Quickleaf! There sure are some great artists out there!

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"All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death."

"Men do not sufficiently realise that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods"

Henri Bergson

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"Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it."

"The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."
-Robertson Davies

"But once one finds oneself in the cavern, escape is only viable if one accepts that, whilst in it, one must act by the rules of the cavern; by the terms of Urizen, the guarding demiurge, for as long as he calls the shots and is looking; for ignoring the reality of the cavern's dominance only ensures that one remains locked in it forever, banging one's heads against the rocks. The path to breaking the incantation -- to Blake's freedom -- entails a form of sincere cooperation that precedes the final betrayal; the betrayal that brings meaning back to absurdity. But since Urizen polices from within, one's left hand must not know what one's right hand is doing, and one must sincerely feel loyalty towards the demiurge."

-Karchen

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It is admirable to consider, how many millions of people, come in and go out of the world, ignorant of themselves and of the world they have lived in.

-William Penn

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"The path to immortality is hard, and only a few find it. The rest await the Great Day when the wheels of the universe shall be stopped and the immortal sparks shall escape from the sheaths of substance. Woe unto those who wait, for they must return again, unconscious and unknowing, to the seed-ground of stars, and await a new beginning...”
― Thoth Hermes Trismegistus

"The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things
Thus, constantly without desire, one observes its essence
Constantly with desire, one observes its manifestations
These two emerge together but differ in name
The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders"
-Lao Tzu

"Punishment. Eternal punishment. The prospect of an eternity of Hell weighed heavily on the mind of Black Harran in his final years. He could not undo a life of sin, but he could seal himself away from the consequences...

...Tiny silver and cold iron tubes surround and feed into a fist-sized diamond. Dark patches churn through the diamond’s core, marring its beauty. An effect similar to a continuous mind blank affects the soul sanctuary, shielding the device from prying eyes. By succeeding on one or more consecutive Knowledge (arcana) checks (each check requires a move action to perform), the owner of the soul sanctuary can unleash several magical effects."

"Two things fill the soul with awe and wonder: the starry heaven above, and the moral law within."
-Kant

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'This perhaps was the mystery of Kaliyuga, the obscure age much favored by women and those without caste, who, in the general confusion, might seize a chance for liberation otherwise denied to them.

In the flagrancy of contradiction, there was no longer any cult that could act as axis and lodestone, only bhakti, the heart's devotion, that addresses itself to anything, is ready for anything, a perennial emotion whose first messengers were Krsna's gopis, wandering around alone with their herds.'
-Roberto Calasso, Ka

'Ok,Vellum is underpinned by this sort of grand theory of mythic history: there's the Vellum itself, a sort of Moorcockian which can be reprogrammed -- graved -- using a language called the Cant; if you can speak this tongue you can change reality, you can change yourself, and that's what the gods and monsters of myth -- the unkin, as I call them -- have done. In the distant past, one group of unkin set up the Covenant; they see themselves as angels, a Heavenly Host, out to stop all these ousted gods of yore who want their glory days back, and now they're gearing up for one last great war...

...Think of reality as having three temporal dimensions. There's frontal time -- the way we live our lives, with future and past as forward and back. There's lateral time -- the parallel worlds to the "left" and "right" of ours, alternate histories where events took other paths. And there's residual time -- where if you dig "down" beneath our world you find archeological strata of more primitive realms with cruder metaphysics in place of our logical and consistent universe of scientific priniciples.

If you want a comparison, think of it as how shared stories like myths work...'

"For ancient poets like Homer, the sun was a being of tremendous spiritual significance. The immense beauty of its rising and setting brought forth a dramatic display of the abiding moral harmony underlying the cosmos. For ancient philosophers like Plato, the sun was similarly a sign of the highest Good, but its visible light was thought to be only partially responsible for the shower of colors drenching earth and sky. Participating in the sunlit phenomena of the outer world was an inner noumenal light emanating from the eyes. Plato suggested that this inner light flows gently outward through the eyes from a psychic fire kindred to that animating the sun. It meets and coalesces with the light of the sun (or at night, the moon and stars) to bring forth the beauty and splendor of the universe. Plato’s was a participatory account of our knowledge of nature, such that soul and world were understood to synergetically intermingle in each act of perception."
-Physics of the World-Soul: The Relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider---
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give---yes or no, or maybe---
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

'Watch this beautifully stylish, animated short film about a dead, lightless world, where a little girl, despite her father's renunciation and despair facing the death of his wife, maintains their dream of building a machine powered by magic winds to fly and reach the sun.'

'The heroes have fought their way through a swath of enemies in the dungeon, only to find themselves outside the final room—the one that contains a cult leader making vile sacrifices, and all of the cult’s treasure. Exhausted and out of resources, instead of pressing on, the adventurers decide to make camp and sleep for the night before facing the cult leader in the morning—right outside his inner sanctum.

'The umbral vampire appears as a pale, exceedingly gaunt humanoid dressed in archaic finery falling to rags. Tangled wisps of hair cling to parchment flesh pulled taut against its skull, and misty strands of darkness leak from its empty eye sockets, yawning nasal cavity, and mouth. Fingers twisted into jagged claws and a permanent rictus grin completes the appearance of undeath. But it is not undead. It is something much worse.'

Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow themselves when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung; as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.
Every thing that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,
Hung their heads, and then lay by.
In sweet music is such art,
Killing care and grief of heart
Fall asleep, or hearing, die.

Wm. Shakespeare.

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“The sun rose on the flawless brimming sea into a sky all brazen–all one brightening for gods immortal and for mortal men on plow lands kind with grain.”
-Homer

“God invented sight and gave it to us so that we might observe the orbits of intelligence in the universe and apply them to the revolutions of our own understanding.”
-Plato

“When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.”
-Whitehead

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William Stafford, Vocation

This dream the world is having about itself
includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,
a groove in the grass my father showed us all
one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell
something better about to happen.

I dreamed the trace to the mountains, over the hills,
and there a girl who belonged wherever she was.
But then my mother called us back to the car:
she was afraid; she always blamed the place,
the time, anything my father planned.

Now both of my parents, the long line through the plain,
the meadowlarks, the sky, the world's whole dream
remain, and I hear him say while I stand between the two,
helpless, both of them part of me:
"Your job is to find what the world is trying to be."

"...forgetting about things that renews their wonder. Just think, when you opened your eyes for the first time as a child, how brilliant colours where, what a jewel the sun was, what marvel the stars, how incredible the trees were. That's because they were new to your eyes...and so by the dispensation of forgetting, the world is constantly renewed, and we are able to see it again and again, and to love again and again....always with renewed intensity, and without the contrast of having seen them before before before, always, always and always.."
-Alan Watts

"There is the profane way of talking, which is to talk about things. And if you care to notice, you will see that in the modern Western world we always talk about something.

There is the word; then there is the point of reference for the word, which is always separate from the word itself. And this, of course, is the basis for nearly all modern linguistics.

But according to people such as Parmenides there is another way of talking. This other way is that instead of talking about, you talk from. If you sense oneness you talk from oneness; and that oneness is communicated through the magic of the word in a way that our minds may find incomprehensible but that, even so, fascinates and endlessly obsesses them. For these people were magicians. The founders of logic and science in the West were sorcerers. They knew what they were doing even if, now, no one knows what they did."
-Peter Kingsley

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Writing is a curious endeavor, swerving from moments of splendid delirium into others of stunned puzzlement, and from there into stretches of calm, focused craft.
- David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

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"Yes, in one sense the people and butterflies are like partners in a dance, with God as the lead dancer. God is trying to guide them into forms of dancing that are beautiful, joyous, and mutually enriching. But God's power is not absolute. What happens in the dance as a whole is an outcome of divine creativity and the universe's creativity, not divine creativity alone.Process thinkers call this the co-creativity of God and the Universe. Co-creativity can result in tragedy as well as joy, horror as well as beauty. In process theology God, understood as the lead dancer, is always trying to guide the world into joy and beauty, not tragedy and horror. God is good.

But the dance metaphor is problematic, inasmuch as it depicts the universe as outside God's life. For process thinkers the universe is not outside God but rather inside God, not unlike a baby is within a mother's womb. The dance of the universe, partly determined by creatures in the universe, is like the moving of a baby within the womb. As the baby kicks, the mother feels it and in some sense it happens to her, too. "
-Jay McDaniel, Whitehead's Idea of God:

'Abel lives in the winter and Apolline lives in the summer. Isolated in their "natures", they never met each other. They are not even supposed to meet. So when Abel crosses the border and discovers Apolline, curiosity is overwhelming. Their encounter soon becomes more complicated than they could imagine. Both of them will have to learn compromise to protect the other...'

'Tricksters are usually thought of as boundary crossers, characters who find the limits and violate them, or keep them lively. Lewis Hyde reimagines this function, saying that tricksters are "joint-workers." They seek out the joints of this world--sometimes to disrupt them, sometimes to move them, and sometimes just to keep them limber.

There is a trickster figure from the mountains of southern Russia, for example, who is known for having reversed the fortunes of the Sun God by attacking his knee joints. "If you want to wound an immortal, go for the joints," is the lesson, and all tricksters know it. Frederick Douglass knew it; his first book attacked the "joints" by which plantation culture articulated itself--especially the "joint" between black and white--and in so doing helped bring an end to the planters' world.Most tricksters are less direct than that; they like to toy with the joints of creation, and shift them around...

...Tricksters sometimes attack the joints of creation, and sometimes simply oil the joints with humor, keeping them flexible. All those who do so are artists in the most ancient sense, and their creations, no matter how unsettling, are the works of art that make this world what it is...'

"Cherrapunji receives about 50 inches of rain a year which would easily rot normal wooden bridges. This is why, 500 years ago, locals began to guide roots and vines from the native Ficus Elastica rubber tree across rivers using hollow bamboo until they became rooted on the opposite side – eventually creating a bridge."

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The Summer Day (Mary Oliver)

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-the one who the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

'e e cummings' father was a Unitarian minister. There's a story that he was about to begin his sermon, and a bird flew into the church and alighted on the altar, and began singing. Cummings waited calmly. When the bird flew away, he quietly said, 'end of sermon" and walked away.'
-Don Salmon

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As always not endorsing or refuting beliefs - this just seems cool to have in Sigil:

'For thousands of years stories were the mortar that held together the past and the future. The ability to survive through the winter was dependent on one’s ability to remember the stories of food and medicine preparation in the spring. Ancient hymns and folk songs held important images that kept spirits high during plagues and nomadic journeys. Circumstance may have changed since these times, but the importance of song and story remain.'

'Helping clients reclaim their story and a connection to their soul does not require shamanic training or special skills obtained in exotic chemical languages. Aristotle in Poetics speaks of storytelling as what gives us a sharable world, connecting and identifying with others through an exchange of subjective tellings. Perhaps what our clients really want when they come to see us is someone to listen to their story, validate their position and help them revision their myth.'

“Consciousness wrongly and foolishly imagines that it has no substantiality inside – that substantiality is only in the object outside...It wants to import the being of the object into itself .. which is a mix-up of perceptional experience...and the...character of the object upon consciousness. We are left hanging in the middle– with a part of objectivity and a part of subjectivity in us..."
-Swami Krishnananda

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'Once, years ago, I was visiting the invertebrate physiologist, Ladd Prosser, at the University of Illinois in Urbana. He took me into his laboratory, where he was recording the electrical responses from a single nerve cell in the ventral nerve cord (which takes the place of our spinal cord) of a cockroach. It was set up to display the electrical potentials on an oscilloscope screen, and simultaneously to let them sound through a loudspeaker. I was hearing a slow, rhythmic reverberation, coming to a peak, then falling off to silence, then starting again, each cycle a few seconds, like a breathing rhythm. Prosser remarked, “That kind of response is typical of a dying nerve cell.”

“My God!” I said, “It’s groaning! You’ve given it a voice, and it’s groaning!”'
-George Wald, Life & Mind in the Universe:

'One by one skin hardens, we’re becoming the beast
Shear power in the heat of hate brings our army of two to its knees
Steel lungs are screaming the house down, going for the kill from the kiss
Battle stations are now navigation, have we driven love to this?'

It's actually pretty great (IMO anyway) how (in spite of the above quote) Sartre manages to show how Hell is more driven by an inability to change and love one's own self. I've thought the best way to interpret Dante's Inferno is to take a similar position to that text.

Damnation is the state of suffering one - perhaps inadvertently - clings to. And of course Jung says it better than I can:

“In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one's whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ - all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself - that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved - what then? Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed: there is no more talk of love and long-suffering; we say to the brother within us, ‘Raca,’ and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide him from the world; we deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves, and had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed.”

' brought all this so you can survive when law is lawless (right here)
Fearless, sensations that you thought were dead
No squealing, remember that it's all in your head

I ain't happy, I'm feeling glad
I got sunshine in a bag
I'm useless but not for long
The future is coming on'

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Your true country is the Universe.
Your true goal is to be yourself and not what others want you to be.
You true love is love for life.
Your true power is the power to help.
Your true happiness is loving what you do.
Your true job is to create beauty.
Your true study is to develop attention.
Your true social action is to plant Conscience.
Your true discipline is to tame the individual ego.
Your true generosity is not wanting anything for yourself that is not for others.
Your true bravery is to leave the certain for the uncertain.
Your true adventure is to give a step into the void.
-Alejandro Jodorowsky

'I can even make out the line of a highway not far off, cutting across the meadows, commuters’ headlights poking through the grim mist. In the half-light, the surrounding stones seem almost familiar and scarcely mysterious. Is this really the place that Thomas Hardy called “a very Temple of the Winds,” describing it “rising sheer from the grass,” its stones seeming to hum with sound? Did Christopher Wren, the great architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, really think so much of Stonehenge that he left his signature chiseled in one of the stones? And why should this site now lure as many as 18,000 celebrants to a summer solstice festival on the day the sun rises through a gap between its central stones, bisecting the monument?

But after the rain, when the sun breaks through the clouds and the pillars of rock cast corridors of shadow, all misgivings are cast aside...'

Be Humble for you are made of Earth, Be Noble for you are made of stars.
-A Serbian Proverb

The man who wants to beat a dog always finds a stick.
-A Serbian Proverb

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Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
-Simone Weil

We believe we are rising because while keeping the same base inclinations (for instance: the desire to triumph over others) we have given them a noble object. We should, on the contrary, rise by attaching noble inclinations to lowly objects.
-Simone Weil

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

"Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history."
-Dune

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'In itself [the tree] is nothing, it only becomes something through the shaping, selecting, presenting consciousness. And since the kinds of possibilities of consciousness are infinite, we can go a step further and say the [tree] is the sum of all possible ways of perceiving it.'
-Lama Govinda, Buddhist Reflections

O ye of true strength, make this thing manifest by your greatness -
Strike the demon with your thunderbolt.
Conceal the horrid darkness, drive far from us each devouring fiend.
Create the light for which we long.
-The Rig Veda

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"Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, as unyielding as the grave."
- Songs 8:6

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“Love is of something, and that which love desires is not that which love is or has; for no man desires that which he is or has. And love is of the beautiful, and therefore has not the beautiful. And the beautiful is the good, and therefore, in wanting and desiring the beautiful, love also wants and desires the good.”
― Plato, Symposium

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Joseph Campbell:

"The moment the life process stops, it starts drying up; and the whole sense of myth is finding the courage to follow the process. In order to have something new, something old has to be broken; and if you’re too heavily fixed on the old, you’re going to get stuck. That’s what hell is: the place of people who could not yield their ego system to allow the grace of a transpersonal power to move them."

"Hell is life drying up.
The Hoarder, the one in us that wants to keep, to hold on, must be killed.
If we are hanging onto the form now, we're not going to have the form next.
You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.
Destruction before creation."

'Lotus Magic: One roleplaying concept I’ve always enjoyed exploring is the idea of personal sacrifice. Just how far are characters willing to go to gain their power within the game? With the Lotus Magic rules, we get a chance to ask that question. Lotus Magic springs from the mystic waters of the Well of Urd, said to feed the roots of the World Tree and influence the fates of all Midgard. The different lotus flowers have separate uses as power components for a variety of spells, but when properly prepared, they grant spellcasters bonuses to their effective caster level in exchange for an escalating level of need and desire. How badly does your spellcaster want that boost in mystic strength? When is the risk outweighed by the reward? I love it when that kind of roleplaying choice is enabled by the mechanics.

Hieroglyphic Magic—the Weret Hekau: In ancient Egyptian, the term “Weret Hekau” means Words of Truth, and I love this particular bit of mechanics because it expands on the Symbolic Magic system described in Deep Magic. While Deep Magic brought together the Rune magic of Northlands and the Aboleth Glyphs of Journeys to the West, I felt the Nurian culture was the perfect place to create a set of magic hieroglyphs, reminiscent of the Pharaonic Book of the Dead. The Hieroglyphic Magic serves to flesh out aspects of the Nurian cults of the God-Kings, giving a bit more depth to the followers of Anu Akma, Aten, and Thoth, while utilizing the very real traditions of protective amulets common in so many cultures. Each of the ten hieroglyphs is formatted like the ones presented in Deep Magic, with associated spells and a mastery bonus, but the Deeper Rune Lore allows for the creation of tokens that permit spellcasters to share this power with their companions in exchange for sacrificing low-level spell slots. I even created a suite of hieroglyphs for modifying summoned creatures. How cool is it to be able to conjure up an ape, but give it a jackal head or a hawk head and granting them aspects of the Nurian pantheon, instead of just a Fiendish or Celestial template?'

"What prevents theoretical insights from going beyond existing limitations and changing to meet new facts is just the belief that theories give true knowledge of reality (which implies, of course, that they never change). Although our modern way of thinking has changed a great deal relative to the ancient one, the two have had one key feature in common: i.e. they are both generally 'blinkered' by the notion that theories give true knowledge about 'reality as it is'. Thus, both are led to confuse the forms and shapes induced in our perceptions by theoretical insight with a reality independent of our thought and way of looking. This confusion is of crucial significance, since it leads us to approach nature, society and the individual in terms of more or less fixed and limited forms of thought, and thus, apparently, to keep on confirming the limitations of these forms of thought in experience."
-David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

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"With these words we have reached the limit of what can be explained about this aspect of the ultimate reality. The truth about it is silent and scriptureless. Both reader and writer must now go into a strange wide ethereal silence if they would move a step further. Silence is the finest method of mystical perceptive worship. What the student has to grasp is that where there is seemingly nothing at all but static Silence, the Real abides; where his individual perception fails to register either form or entity, there the Overself IS. When he can put the littleness of self aside for a moment and think of that Infinite Element within which he dwells, he will be overwhelmed with a sense of the wonder and mystery that surround the daily movements of mortal men."
-Paul Brunton, A Meditation on the Serpent’s Path

There was a young fellow named Todd
Who said, "It's exceedingly odd
To think that this tree Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."

The reply:

There is nothing especially odd;
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why this tree
Can continue to be
When observed by
Yours faithfully, God.
-Ronald Knox

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"He is quite right in questioning the usefulness of getting involved in an endless study of the intricate classifications of his surroundings, if they are illusory. From the standpoint of the Ultimate Path such a study is a waste of time and therefore is not indulged in. The aim of this path is to know the ultimate reality--knowing which, all its illusory reflections are naturally understood. However, he must be careful in the use of the word "illusory." The world is not illusory but the apprehension of it through the senses is. Each object regarded separately as an independent entity is illusory but regarded as what it is in its formless essence it is real. To put this in plainer language: everything seen is merely an idea in the mind. Ideas come and go and in this sense only are unreal; but the stuff out of which they are formed--that is, Mind--does not come and go and constitutes the ultimate basis of all ideas and therefore of their ultimate reality. He seeks to understand what this Mind is."
-Paul Brunton

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“No apter metaphor having been found for certain emotional colours, I assert that gods exist.”
-Eztra Pound

'With a sense of separation there comes insecurity and vulnerability. That is when our search actually starts because insecurity and vulnerability is not happiness. It is not completeness. It is not wholeness. The search starts to try and make ourselves whole or complete or more secure and less vulnerable. And naturally, because our parents have not looked at it or understood it, our society and nations have not looked at it or understood it, the search starts ‘out there’. Nobody ever says to him ‘Look back’ or ‘Stay with that essence that you are, that natural state that you were and still are, before those clouds of thought began to form.’
-Sailor Bob Adamson

'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.

‘Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual’s circumstances -- and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse -- then you don’t have life after death; you just have death.’
--Iain M Banks, Look To Windward

He would give up then, and console himself with something she’d said: that you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered.
--Iain M Banks, The Player of Games

Shadowrun: Dragonfall Director’s Cut (2013)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyUktyFHrb4 (not really Planescape-y, or even Planescape-esque-- until you actually play it, that is-- but the expansion campaign was one of the better story-driven cRPGs to come out in a while. Now out in a standalone version!)

"Very early in his early career, Pauli had followed the road of skepticism based on rationalism right to the end, to a skepticism about skepticism, and he tried to trace out those elements of the cognitive process that precede a rational understanding in depth."
-Heisenberg on Wolfgang Pauli

‘I do not believe in the possible future of mysticism in the old form. However, I do believe that the natural sciences will out of themselves bring forth a counter pole in their adherents, which connects to the old mystic elements.’
-Pauli on Pauli

It is the magic of the Magician you are trying to analyse, but only when you enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself can you begin to experience the true origination, significance and circles of the Lila. I say "begin" because the Divine Reality is not so simple that at the first touch you can know all of it or put it into a single formula; it is the Infinite and opens before you an infinite knowledge to which all Science put together is a bagatelle. But still you do touch the essential, the eternal behind things and in the light of That all begins to be profoundly luminous, intimately intelligible."
-Sri Aurobindo

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"We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and pine may whisper to each other with their leaves...but the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands hang together through the oceans' bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea..."
-William James

"A couple of companies at Gencon had sound effect software/music on offer specifically for role-playing games. Sound effects are something I never tried on my RPG table, so I thought I should check out two Gencon offerings and one source that I found independently. These offerings range from mixing board applications, standard MP3 sound effects and themed music."

'Skarbek’s primary claim is that the underlying order in California prisons comes from precisely what most of us would assume is the source of disorder: the major gangs, which are responsible for the vast majority of the trade in drugs and other contraband, including cellphones, behind bars. “Prison gangs end up providing governance in a brutal but effective way,” he says. “They impose responsibility on everyone, and in some ways the prisons run more smoothly because of them.” The gangs have business out on the streets, too, but their principal activity and authority resides in prisons, where other gangs are the main powers keeping them in check.'

Any one can get angry — that is easy … but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy.
-Aristotle

=-=-=

"You are not thinking. You are merely being logical."
-Niels Bohr to Albert Einstein

'An aeromancer is a wizard/sorcerer archetype who functions like an air elementalist: a wizard who has specialized in the air elemental school of magic. Unlike a normal air elementalist, an aeromancer gains a host of really awesome aeromancy abilities!

Now you’re probably wondering what aeromancy is.

Aeromancy is a specialized variant of arcane casting where practitioners sacrifice prepared spells or spell slots to power magic devices filled with the imbued waters of the Well of Urd to produce air-themed magic effects. The narrow focus of an aeromancer’s spell selection is offset by the ability to augment their casting on the fly, which increases elements of their spells as needed by sacrificing additional spells or spell slots.'

"Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets."
-Sartre, The Flies

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“The important thing is allowing the whole world to Wake Up. Part of allowing the whole world to wake up is recognizing that the whole world Is Free—Everybody Is Free to Be As They Are. Until the whole world Is Free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the Freedom to Everyone to like you or not like you, to Love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the Whole World Its Freedom—you’ll never have Your Freedom.”
― Adyashanti, from The End of Your World

Really liking Yo Az. And the debates between Niels Bohr and Einstein would be a great starting point for a pair of recurring Guvner NPCs. Friendly with each other but fundamentally divided on the nature of the multiverse.

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.
-- Raymond Chandler

Great stuff Unsung! Liked that Chandler quote, and the Eagleman Stag. Definitely going to track down Darker than Black.

Not sure if I saw the Sesame Street thing in my youth, but I enjoyed it now. :-)

=-=-=

“As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance”
-John Wheeler

=-=-=
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, hatred, cruelty, no more greed... I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.
~Thomas Merton

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth all sensation is already memory.”

“Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.”

--
In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness.

And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.

"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.

"Certainly," said man.

"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.

And He went away.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

Live by the foma (‘harmless untruths’) that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy. - The Books of Bokonon 1:5
--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.”
--Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

So much great stuff Unsung! I hope to catch up and comment on all of it soon, but for now I'll throw out some interesting quotes I've come across that remind me of PS:

“The authentic and pure values—truth, beauty, and goodness—in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.”

-Simone Weil

“Bring all the art and science of the world, and baffle and humble it with one spear of grass.”

-Walt Whitman

“Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is a weapon of offensive and defensive war against the enemy.”

-Picasso

“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”
― James P. Carse

“Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.”
― James P. Carse